Image Credit and litter of working canine puppies
from parents Zzisa (TSA) X Ffisher
at the Penn Vet Working Dog Center

Customs dogs have long been trained to sniff out narcotics, firearms or explosives hidden in strange places or wrapped in layers of plastic. Some have even been trained to sniff out large amounts of undeclared cash.

In Australia, labradors, selected for their steady temperament, motivation, adaptability to challenging environments, and non-threatening appearance, are purpose-bred by the Department of Immigration and Border Protection at their Customs National Breeding and Development Centre. At the age of two, these eager juvenile pups begin sniffer training with a handler.

The United States TSA’s Puppy Program, started in 1999 was modeled after the Australian Customs Service National Breeding Program and selects dogs with the abilities and temperaments suited to customs authorities needs. Many of these working canines are earmarked for explosives detection canine teams, trained and certified by the TSA for the purposes of transportation-related security.

Detector dogs are routinely tasked to search air and sea cargo, aircraft, cargo containers, luggage, mail, parcels, structures, vehicles, vessels, and most importantly, people. But what if multi-response detector dogs, already being trained to sniff out multiple substances, could be trained to also detect smuggled antiquities which might be hidden in those same crates, packages, and cargo containers?

Interpol and UNESCO listed art theft as the fourth-largest black
market in the world (after drugs, money-laundering, and weapons). But
what did that mean? After I’d been following [Bonnie] Czegledi’s career for several
years, one point was clear: don't look at the Hollywood versions of an art thief -- the Myth. This is a bigger game, with more players, and the legitimate
business of art is directly implicated. A lot of the crimes are hidden in
the open. Stealing art is just the beginning. Then the art is
laundered up into the legitimate market, into private collections, into the
world's most renowned museums.

-- Joshua
Knelman, author of Hot Art

Toronto journalist Joshua Knelman, author of Hot Art: Chasing Thieves and Detectives Through
the Secret World of Stolen Art (Tin House Books,
2012), introduces to the general
reader the international problem of art crime and the limited resources of
legal authorities in fighting this problem in the first decade of the 21st
century.

In
2003, Knelman was just a 26-year-old researcher for the Canadian magazine Walrus when he stumbled down the rabbit
hole of art theft and recovery. A
gallery owner hesitant to speak about the theft of $250,000 worth of
photographs stolen two years earlier opens up to Knelman after police recover part of the stolen artwork. Knelman eventually contacts the suspect’s lawyer, and that leads to a midnight phone call from the
thief who has been investigating Knelman. The two meet in a café in
Toronto. The aspiring reporter is physically
threatened, given stolen art, and then lectured by the thief about how the
secretive business practices in the legitimate art market actually supports art
crime. Thus begins Knelman’s
adventures through the world of thieves and investigators of looted art.

The journalist befriends Bonnie Czegledi, a Toronto attorney specializing
in art crime, who educates Knelman about the types of stolen art and cultural
property: missing Holocaust-looted artworks; pillaging of antiquities from
source countries such as Egypt, Afghanistan, and Turkey; multi-million dollar
thefts from museums worldwide; and unreported thefts from galleries and
residences. Knelman writes:

The world’s cultural heritage had become one big
department store, and thieves of all kinds, at all levels, were shoplifting
with impunity, as if the one security guard on duty was out on a smoke break.

Ten years ago when Knelman first met Czegledi,
tools to recover stolen art included Interpol’s stolen art database; the
International Council of Museum’s guidelines for the buying practices of
museums; the International Foundation for Art Research; and the Art Loss
Register.

For example, Knelman relates that a curator at the Royal Ontario
Museum was offered the chance to buy some Iraqi antiquities (the institution declined). This was after the National Museum of Iraq was looted in 2003 and about 25 years after Canada had signed the 1970 Convention barring importing stolen artwork across international borders.

Knelman points out that only a handful of detectives worldwide have
the expertise and training to investigate art thefts – from the pairs of police
officers located in Montreal and Los Angeles to the larger European squads in
England and Italy.

In
2005, Knelman’s published an article in The
Walrus, “Artful Crimes” which highlights art crime in Canada against an
increasingly global and transnational problem. But he wasn’t done with the story. Two years later, Knelman paid his own way to join cultural attorney Czegledi at
the International Ccouncil of Museum’s conference in Cairo. American prosecutor Rick St. Hilaire
guides him through Egyptian history of ancient art crimes and summarizes the
problem of smuggling of antiquities today which Knelman smartly summarizes in
his book. Knelman also meets Alain
Lacoursière, the police officer that initiated the study of art crime in Quebec,
while dodging an Egyptian conference organizer who demands the journalist pay a
higher rate on his hotel room – Knelman sleeps on the floor in another room to
avoid paying the organizer his cut.

By 2008, Knelman has a contract to write an investigative book on the
mysterious and increasingly violent black market for stolen art. He goes online to
find an art thief interviewed by the magazine Foreign Policy. He tracks downPaul
Hendry, a Brighton knocker who graduated to handling millions of dollars in
stolen paintings and antiques. “We
struck up what turned out to be a three-year conversation,” Knelman
writes. “We started to talk once,
twice, sometimes three times a week.”

“It was easy to
make a living from stealing art, according to Paul, if a thief made intelligent
choices, if he stayed below a certain value mark – about $100,000. Less was better. Don’t steal a van Gogh. To someone who knew how to work the
system, the legitimate business of fine art became a giant laundry machine for
stolen art. You could steal a
piece and sell it back into the system without anyone being the wiser.”

“It’s called
‘pass the hot potato,’” Paul told me.
“A dealer sells it on to the next dealer, and the next, until nobody
knows where it came from. It’s a
fantastic system! And that system
is the same wherever you are. It
doesn’t matter if you’re talking about London, New York or New Delhi,” he
explained. “Art is something you
have to think about as a commodity that goes round in circles. The only time it appears in the open is
when someone tries to filter it into the legitimate art market – auctions, art
fairs, gallery sales, dealers.
Otherwise it’s hidden away inside someone’s home.”

Hendry grew up in Brighton and
learned his outlaw trade as a “Knocker” who talked elderly residents out of their art and antiques. Since 1965 Sussex Police had been responding to a high
number of residential burglaries and created England’s first Art and Antiques
Squad that operated until 1989.

According to Paul, in the 1960s
Brighton closed down a large open-air market and built a huge shopping mall,
Churchill Square. Produce vendors
started going door to door, which created opportunities to buy “good
junk.” They became known as “knockers”.

Knockers sold
“junk” to antique dealers at a price higher than they had paid for it. Knocking turned into a devious game
that allowed thieves to peek at the inventory inside the houses of the upper
middle class.’

Hendry tells Knelman of his poor
and chaotic childhood, his training on the streets of crime, and how he hires
local men from the neighborhood bar to break into
homes and steal family treasures that Hendry can then sell.

"Interpol and UNESCO listed art theft as the fourth-largest black market in the world (after drugs, money-laundering, and weapons). But what did that mean? ... one point was clear: don't look at the Hollywood versions of art theft -- the Myth. This is a bigger game, with more players, and the legitimate business of art is directly implicated. A lot of the crimes are hidden in the open. Stealing art is just the beginning. Then the art is laundered up into the legitimate market, into private collections, into the world's most renowned museums." -- excerpt from Joshua Knelman's Hot Art

Toronto journalist Joshua Knelman, author of Hot Art: Chasing Thieves and Detective Through the Secret World of Stolen Art (Tin House Books, 2012), will launch the American Trade Paper version of his book from 6 to 8 p.m. on March 22 at The Flag Art Foundation in New York.

Knelman’s four year investigation of stolen art began with a local story
about a burglary at a gallery in Toronto and ended with an international perspective. His nonfiction book begins in Hollywood in 2008 with the Art Theft Detail of the Los Angeles Police Department in a ride along with Detectives Don Hrycyk and Stephanie Lazarus who are investigating the robbery of an antiques store on La Cienega Boulevard. Knelman immediately contrasts the meticulous and steady work of the police (he describes Hrycyk working art theft cases "with the patience of a scientist") with the images of glamorous heist movies such as The Thomas Crown Affair (1999).

In the first two chapters ("Hollywood" and "Law and Disorder") he links organized crime with art theft: the Los Angeles District Attorney's office had identified an Armenian gang for the antique-store job on La Cienega. In the second chapter, Knelman describes his coverage for The Walrus, a Canadian magazine, on a burglary at a small art gallery in 2003 and how the thief threatened him, tried to hand over stolen property to him, and then tries to educate him "about how art theft worked as an industry" as a way of distracting Knelman for the thief's own crimes:

He discussed how poor the security systems were at most of the major cultural institutions and of course at mid-sized and smaller galleries. That made his job easier. So there was that angle -- art galleries and museums weren't adequately protecting themselves against pros like him.

Then he veered in another direction.

"Okay, this is how it works," he said. "It's like a big shell game. All the antique and art dealers, they just pass it around from one to another." He moved his fingers around the table in circles and then looked up. "Do you understand?" He looked very intense, as if he had just handed me a top-secret piece of information, but I had no idea what he meant. What did art dealers have to do with stealing art? But our meeting was over.

Knelman published an article in The Walrus in 2005, "Artful Crimes", about international art theft.

In his book, Hot Art, Knelman meets cultural property attorney Bonnie Czegledi (author of Crimes Against Art: International Art and Cultural Heritage Law (Carswell, 2010) who introduces him to the roles of Interpol; the International Council of Museums; the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR) and the Art Loss Register. Knelman traveled with Czegledi to an International Council of Museums conference in Cairo, at his own expense, getting shaken down by a conference organizer for additional hotel fees above and beyond what he had agreed to pay the hotel manager. Knelman meets Canadian police officer Alain Lacoursière and speaker Rick St. Hilaire, then a county prosecutor in New Hampshire who lectured on the impact of art theft in the United States and "knew a lot about the impact of art theft on Egypt." He visits the Egyptian Museum in Cairo with St. Hilaire and provides a great history of the collection and Napoleon's visit in the 19th century.

Knelman provides a personal account, both thrilling and dangerous, and admirable. The book contains primary information for research into the black market of art, including a few chapters with an art thief, Paul Hendry, in England.

The book also provides a detailed profile of Don Hrycyk at the LAPD and the history of the Art Theft Detail, beginning with the work of Detective Bill Martin and includes information about Hryck's investigation of a residential art robbery in Encino in 2008; other cases ("his work was the most detailed example I found of a North American city interacting with the global black market"); a tour of the evidence warehouse which included fake art that had been the subject of a string operation into a Dr. Vilas Likhite; and an anecdote of an attempted theft at an unnamed major museum under renovation in Los Angeles. In 2008, Knelman also interviewed artist June Wayne, founder of Tamarind Lithography Workshop (now the Tamarind Institute), who had a tapestry stolen in 1975; Leslie Sacks, owner of Leslie Sacks Fine Art in Brentwood, who discusses security measures and two burglaries; and Bob Combs, director of security at The Getty Center.

Both Hrycyk and Czegledi reference art historian Laurie Adams' book, Art Cop, about New York Police Detective Robert Volpe, the first detective in North America to investigate art theft full-time (1971 to 1983) after his role as a undercover narcotics cop in the late 1960s in a famous case memorialized in the film The French Connection about a ring of heroin dealers importing the drug from France.